I don’t know his situation but I think primary residence up to certain value shouldn’t be taxed at all. There’s a huge difference between an old man living alone in a house he had built for his family 60 years ago and an “investor” who owns entire neighbourhoods.
Owing your home today is nearly impossible, but even if you did the ever increasing property taxes will bury you
Submitted 1 month ago by Mickey7@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/df71fdb1-3bb6-414b-b89a-658fb8efb7e2.jpeg
Comments
MordercaSkurwysyn@lemm.ee 1 month ago
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Agreed. I’d vote to drop property tax for those over 65 and under a certain income limit.
AppleTea@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
tying it to income means in a few decades inflation just shrinks the number of people who can actually benefit
If you own one residential property and also live in it, no taxes on that. Multiple properties? That’s taxes. Unfortunately, most primary education is funded by property tax, so you’d have to change how that works (and maybe actually pay teachers while your at it). Fortunately, none of this has any chance of ever getting implemented.
Dadifer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah, that guy could sell his house for 5 times what he built it for
HikingVet@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
5? I bought my house a decade ago and it has almost doubled. If he built his house for less than his current property taxes, he would easily get 10x if not higher.
Mickey7@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And then where is going to afford to buy another house to live in?
Dadifer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Maybe he should stop eating avocado toast
Spaniard@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you pay property taxes then the property isn’t yours.
ilega_dh@feddit.nl 1 month ago
As it should. You’re telling me someone can just buy a piece of the earth and everyone born after them is just shit outta luck? Fuck that.
Spaniard@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Well isn’t that pretty much what my local government did?
Gladaed@feddit.org 1 month ago
Certified psycho. If you think owning a plot of land within a country does not have an opportunity cost you are wrong. If you think people imposing costs on others shouldn’t pay for it say it out loud.
Just go and found your own country already, you just need a gun in order to enforce your ownership. In the end a state is just the monopoly of force in a place.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yeah, this is one of the meanings of “property is theft”. To own land is deny all others that piece of land.
Spaniard@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I agree with the point that land is owned by the one strong enough to enforce ownership.
Mickey7@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This is such an excellent point. Exactly when do we get to stop paying for something that we already own
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think an issue is that taxes are not seen for what they are. The government and agency work on our behalf but don’t get paid until I pay my taxes. Maybe the local government just needs to send these bills to people’s houses instead and get rid of taxes altogether.
Soleos@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I disagree that it’s an issue. I believe vast majority of people understand what a tax is, even if they feel taxes are shitty and respond with blame-y frustration. All words will be misunderstood by some people. Sometimes more and sometimes fewer. If we kept changing the name of things because a vocal minority of people can’t read a dictionary, then we will end up with a handful of generic words that don’t actually mean anything. I believe a better solution is to envest in education more broadly.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Something I’m beginning to learn is that what I thought was originally the minority is actually the majority and vice versa
Nomecks@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Property tax rates are based on how much your city/county needs to operate. Property values change, but so do mill rates. Most cities aren’t allowed to take surplus tax, so they tweak the mill rate when property values fluctuate.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The government gets to decide how much the government is allowed to fuck you. Seems fair.
Cryophilia@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Theoretically, in a democracy, we ARE the government.
SoulWager@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Eh, probably paid like 25k for a house that’s worth 500k now. Really what we need to do is make property taxes scale more aggressively, so it isn’t economical to hoard more resources than you can actually use. Maybe something like annual tax owed = (value of all real estate owned by one person)^2/10,000,000. Perhaps with a grace period for new construction/renovations.
boonhet@lemm.ee 1 month ago
As for appraisal, let people declare what their property is worth, and force them to sell if someone offers 20% more than their claimed value.
Ah yes, force people to move out of their homes. What’s lemmy’s obsession with uprooting families lately?
buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Has nothing to do with “uprooting families”. Average American families are not the ones overestimating the values of their property. It’s people like Trump who use overestimated values on their properties in order to hide money and grift people into paying him more than properties are actually worth. And then readjusting to actual values, or lower, in order to dodge taxes.
SoulWager@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Land is a natural resource, and like air or sunlight, nobody deserves to own it more than anybody else.
“But my family has live here for generations!” sounds awful similar to “I deserve it because my great grandfather killed the people that used to live here.”
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Investment company comes in and buys literally everything because they can just offer 20% over value. Now they rent it out for twice as much as your mortgage cost. What are you going to do, not like there are any other houses left.
SoulWager@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Think about what the investment company’s tax rate would look like. They’d be bankrupt instantly.
Heyting@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Socialise the housing market and make sure every person has a roof over their head. It’s the only proven solution to homelessness.
Mickey7@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I really like the self appraisal idea
pr0sp3kt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Sorry, oh the irony is rich.
MetalMachine@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Property taxes always made me think that you don’t actually own it, rather its a different form of rent based on property value. I know its the not the same as renting as you have stored value if you sell, but its difficult to call it “ownership”
RangerJosey@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Nobody tell him that in Communist China you pay a small land tax once every 70 years or so.
Actually someone do tell him. I bet that little factoid will flip his entire worldview on its head.
Bag@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
Diddlydee@feddit.uk 1 month ago
America is such a shitshow.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Counterpoint: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
Marx was not a fan.
Agent641@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Property tax hurts landlords and I’m here for that.
What did this guy pay for his house, like 20k?
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
I’m really trying to reconcile how the Chinese manage a more equal society while having a fraction of the tools we do; they don’t have property taxes, just a lease you renew every ~70 years, they can’t do QE like we do.
It’s like we have all the tools to delay the trajectory of capitalism, we just choose not to use it.
Speculater@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So you never own your house in China, is what I’m reading in your post.
thatradomguy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I can’t even afford a dingy studio where I’m at… tf
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 1 month ago
What type of community will his home exist in if everyone stops paying taxes?
Boomers underfunded the schools and shit around here to get out of taxes. Now that they’re ready to move to Florida, they don’t understand why no one wants to buy their house.
bitjunkie@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I wish someone had told me this 4 years ago…
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Using retirees as a tool to work against property taxes has historically been an effective strategy, but it’s important to remember:
- What we’re actually trying to accomplish
- Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
- Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
- Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
One-by-one:
What we’re actually trying to accomplish
Seems to me that the root question is one of housing affordability, in particular for retirees, who may have a lot of assets, but limited cash flow
Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
Reducing/capping property taxes does indeed make it easier for some retirees to keep affording their homes, but reducing property taxes makes real estate a more lucrative investment, driving up the overall prices of real estate. This applies for both private persons intending to use the property to live in, for private persons looking seek rent, and corporate actors doing the same. Messing with property taxes is a large part of the housing affordability issue present in many places in the U.S and elsewhere (zoning laws being another major contributor, in particular those mandating single family homes, and lack of public housing being the other major contributor). Hence, this change would only benefit those lucky enough to have purchased a home in the past, at the expense of all retirees not already that lucky, which are now less likely to be able to do so.
Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
Apart from driving up the prices of real estate for other retirees, everyone else interested in purchasing a home will also feel this broad increase in prices. This has led to large swaths of the population being effectively priced out of home ownership. This has the second order effect of making owning rentals more lucrative, as higher rents can be charged, further exacerbating the larger problem of housing affordability, but now also for even poorer people.
Finally, reductions in real estate taxes limit what public services can be funded through their use. In the U.S, this primarily means schools, infrastructure, firefighting, transit etc, all of which are suffering a lot in quality, much as a consequence of having messed with property taxes in the past.
There’s a very, very strong case to be made that the consequences have very much outweighed the benefits in this scenario. I would even say that they have been devastating, being part of the root cause of a large amount of issues seen today.
Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
There clearly are good means to tackle this problem in other ways, the principal of which I believe should be massive public investment in social housing. By building a huge supply of high quality homes affordable to everyone, we make sure no one will have to be forced to go without an acceptable home, regardless of whether they are retired or not.
The second strategy should be to entirely remove the kind of zoning laws that have contributed to the kind of increase in housing prices seen today - mandating that only single family homes should be allowed to be built on massive lots with low utilization is hugely harmful to housing affordability.
These two measures would address housing prices having gone up in the way they have historically, which would also lead to property taxes not rising in such a dramatic fashion.
What should never be done, however, is reducing or capping property taxes.
angrystego@lemmy.world 1 month ago
You make it sound like it’s either or. The resonable thing to do would be to reduce property taxes for the property the owner lives in and tax even more the additional properties. The goal is for people to be able to afford their homes and at the same time making properties not so attractive as an investment.
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Please refer to the section about the negative effects of reducing property taxes.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
i mean, this is less of a property tax issue and more of a social security thing.
Though i am pretty fundamentally against property tax, it’s a physical thing that i can own, i don’t see why i should pay taxes on it. If you want to tax me just hit me with income tax.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
the wealthy dodge this by a bunch of schemes that don’t count as ‘income’.
I hate paying property tax, but reckon it’s the only way to get money out of the fortunate ones that are lucky enough to own a chunk.
ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And the bigger the chunk, the more they owe.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
yeah, that’s called tax evasion, which is fraudulent. That’s bad. I feel like i don’t have to explain this, but the obvious implication is that we should fix tax evasion, by preventing loopholes. And shutting down the rest of the frankly, redundant tax law that doesn’t really do anything except make it more complicated, and harder to track.
bluewing@lemm.ee 1 month ago
It’s pretty easy to dodge property taxes also.
m0darn@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
It’s a wealth tax on wealth that’s very difficult to hide.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
except for the fact that it’s a wealth tax on wealth that’s not really consequential. An income tax by definition must tax ALL income earned by an individual, you cannot hide from that, it’s definitionally, evasion.
Spaceballstheusername@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Property has infrastructure like water, roads, electrical, sewers, etc running to it that needs to be maintained. It also has things like fire fighting police surveyors etc that need to be paid in order to maintain society. Everyone could work in a city therefore the city/county/state would collect the income tax but the local town you live in doesn’t get any of that money.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
there’s also stuff like gas tax, which often funds roads. Infrastructure often isn’t really related to the amount of property there is anyway. It’s related to the amount of land, and density per sq mile. But i guess you could charge farmers a lot of property tax, since they own a lot of land, that will solve that problem.
thisorthatorwhatever@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Roads that are too big, house that are too spread out.
Police because stores refuse to hire their own security and offload it to onto your property tax.
Sewers because dumb people are too stupid to compost properly, and now we need chemicals on farm fields since the traditional method of composting is dead.
Garbage trucks and landfills because companies sell you wrappers and containers that outlive the products and are made from toxic waste.
Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
People need to stop thinking about property like it’s any other regular thing like a vehicle.
Land is not a thing it is a limited resource.
If someone owns a piece of land in a city it doesn’t matter what they are currently doing with it, even if they do nothing with it, that’s wasting potential that someone else could be doing with it and affects everyone around that piece of land.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
that is true, but it’s not like we have things like imminent domain.
Brosplosion@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Cause you don’t own it. You are borrowing it from the government.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
yeah but then i shouldn’t have to pay for it, i should be able to rent it, or lease it. Which to be fair, i guess leasing is the closest thing.